Teaching Fairy Tale Delusions to Children

For another creation story (according to the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle 6) that, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, "just makes sense," click here.[excerpted from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.]

And here's the entire campus of the "university" where "Doctor" Hovind got his advanced degree:

Published - January, 20, 2007

A decade for 'Dr. Dino'

Kent Hovind gets 10 years for violating federal tax law

Michael Stewart

A newly remorseful Pensacola evangelist, who still disputes the government's right to make him pay taxes, was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on federal tax charges.

His wife, Jo, will be sentenced March 1 on charges of evading bank-reporting requirements.

Before his sentencing, a tearful Kent Hovind compared his situation to that of the lion and the mouse in Aesop's Fables.

"I feel like the mouse," Hovind told U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers. "I stand here in great fear of the power of this court. Your decision can destroy my life, my ministry and my grandchildren."

Hovind's courtroom comments were in stark contrast to more-combative statements he made in recent telephone calls from Escambia County Jail.

In a recording of one of the telephone conversations played in court Friday, Hovind said the Internal Revenue Service, presiding judge and prosecutor broke the law by going after him, and there were things he could do "to make their lives miserable."

Comparing himself to a buffalo in a lion fight, Hovind's voice was heard saying "As long as I have some horns, I'm going to swing. As long as I have some hoofs, I'm going to kick. As long as I have some teeth, I'm going to fight. The lion's going to know he's been in a fight."

In November, a jury found Kent Hovind guilty on 58 federal counts, including failure to pay $845,000 in employee-related taxes. Jo Hovind was convicted of 44 of the counts that involved evading bank-reporting requirements.

Kent Hovind, owner of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land on North Palafox Street in Pensacola, has maintained he owes no taxes because everything he owns belongs to God.

During his trial, Kent Hovind was characterized as a tax protester who paid his employees in cash and labeled them "missionaries" to avoid payroll tax and FICA requirements.

Accused of failing to pay $473,818 in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes between March 31, 2001 and Jan. 31, 2004, Kent Hovind maintains he has broken no laws.

"I am not a tax protester and never have been," Kent Hovind told Rodgers. "The laws are just fine. It is just that some are enforcing laws that are not there."

The recordings, compiled by the IRS from phone conversations from jail, showed Kent Hovind was trying to hide assets from the government, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmyer said.

In one phone conversation played in court, Kent Hovind was heard to advise a business partner to put only "what you can afford to lose" in a church account.

The court was packed with the Hovinds' supporters and spilled into the lobby for lack of seating. During a break, several gathered in a circle, held hands and prayed.

A creationist who believes dinosaurs and modern man walked the earth together, Kent Hovind has traveled the world debating evolutionists and giving lectures. His theme is dedicated to creationism.

Several people testified on Kent Hovind's behalf and described him as a man of honesty and integrity whose beliefs are sincere.

"My father is not a man who is in love with money. He's in love with God," son Eric Hovind said. "He is a man who loves this country and loves others."

When handing down the sentence, Rodgers admonished those present the trial "is not and has never been about religion."

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that churches are not exempt from paying employment taxes, she explained, and what happened was a result of Kent Hovind "refusing to accept what the law is."

Furthermore, Rodgers contended Kent Hovind had failed his fellow citizens and the men and women of the military -- who fight to defend his freedoms -- by refusing to pay taxes.

"With these rights and privileges comes a great responsibility and one of those responsibilities is to pay taxes," Rodgers said.

Hovind, an avowed creationist, has widely publicized his "standing offer" to pay $250,000 to anyone who can provide scientific evidence of evolution.

"No one has ever observed a dog produce a non-dog," Hovind once wrote in reply to a New York Times article.

The indictments also said the Hovinds' made cash withdrawals from AmSouth Bank in a manner that evaded federal requirements for reporting cash transactions.

The withdrawals were for $9,500 or $9,600, just below the $10,000 starting point for reporting cash transactions.

Most of the withdrawals were days apart. For example, the indictment shows three withdrawals of $9,500 each on July 20, July 23 and July 26 in 2001.

The indictments also charged Kent Hovind with impeding an IRS investigation.

Among the things he was accused of doing:

* Filing a frivolous lawsuit against the agency demanding damages for criminal trespass.

* Filing an injunction against an IRS special agent.

* Filing false complaints against the IRS for false arrest, excessive use of force and theft.

* Making threats against investigators and those cooperating with the investigation.

Judge Davis had released the Hovinds from custody pending their trial.

Over Kent Hovind's protests, the judge took away his passport and guns Hovind claimed belonged to his church.

Hovind argued that he needed his passport to continue his evangelism work. He said "thousands and thousands" had been waiting to hear him preach in South Africa.

But Davis agreed with Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmyer, who argued that "like-minded people" might secret Hovind away if he left the country.

As for the guns, Davis said "ownership was not the issue."

Kent Hovind also has had run-ins with state authorities.

In April, Circuit Judge Michael Allen ordered the buildings at Dinosaur Adventure Land closed because Hovind failed to obtain a building permit during the 2002 construction. The outdoor theme park was allowed to stay open.

Members of Creation Science Evangelism said at the time that building permits violated their "deeply held" religious beliefs.

While the building permit case was tied up in a four-year court battle, ownership of the theme park was turned over to Glen Stoll, who works with Hovind on legal issues and is based in Washington.

Last year, the U.S. attorney in Seattle filed a lawsuit against Stoll, charging him with encouraging people to avoid tax payments by claiming to be religious entities, according to news reports.

Not to mention dishonesty, bigotry, and idiocy.

No way WE descended from apes! Right?

For some folks, the idea
that we descended from apelike ancestors is ludicrous blasphemy. For others of us, after considering the evidence, the idea that we didn't is ludicrous, primitive, apelike ;-) thinking. Here's another bit of info to help you decide for yourself.

But Doesn't the Existence of a WatchIndicate the Existence of a Designer?Can Life Be a Random Accident?

In the following very brief essay, Richard Dawkins explains that watches must have a designer, life does not need one, and evolution by natural selection is anything but "random." Our only scientific theory of creation shows us how life was shaped — or, speaking metaphorically, one could say, "how it was designed" — by the non-random operation of natural selection.

New Scientist

September 17, 2005

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly.

Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion. In 1859, Charles Darwin announced one of the greatest ideas ever to occur to a human mind: cumulative evolution by natural selection. Living complexity is indeed orders of magnitude too improbable to have come about by chance. But only if we assume that all the luck has to come in one fell swoop. When cascades of small chance steps accumulate, you can reach prodigious heights of adaptive complexity. That cumulative build-up is evolution. Its guiding force is natural selection.

Every living creature has ancestors, but only a fraction have descendants. All inherit the genes of an unbroken sequence of successful ancestors, none of whom died young and none of whom failed to reproduce. Genes that program embryos to develop into adults who can successfully reproduce automatically survive in the gene pool, at the expense of genes that fail. This is natural selection at the gene level, and we notice its consequences at the organism level. There has to be an ultimate source of new genetic variation, and it is mutation. Copies of newly mutated genes are reshuffled through the gene pool by sexual reproduction, and selection removes them from the pool in a way that is non-random.

What makes for success in the business of life varies from species to species. Some swim, some walk, some fly, some climb, some root themselves into the soil and tilt green solar panels toward the sun. All this diversity stems from successive branchings, starting from a single bacterium-like ancestor, which lived between 3 and 4 billion years ago. Each branching event is called a speciation: a breeding population splits into two, and they go their separately evolving ways. Among sexually reproducing species, speciation is said to have occurred when the two gene pools have separated so far that they can no longer interbreed. Speciation begins by accident. When separation has reached the stage where there is no interbreeding even without a geographical barrier, we have the origin of a new species.

Natural selection is quintessentially non-random, yet it is lamentably often miscalled random. This one mistake underlies much of the sceptical backlash against evolution. Chance cannot explain life. Design is as bad an explanation as chance because it raises bigger questions than it answers. Evolution by natural selection is the only workable theory ever proposed that is capable of explaining life, and it does so brilliantly.

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